I guess the flip side of being empathetic is being oversensitive. I really don’t like using that word, as I have expressed previously, since people are as sensitive as they happen to be. But our triggers that come from past trauma aren’t always rational or productive. Sometimes they hold us back from getting the good things out of life.
When I lived in Cincinnati, I went through a period of doing temp secretarial work in various offices and once I was assigned to Red Cross Headquarters downtown. The work wasn’t particularly exciting, just typing membership information into a word processor, but what was really intriguing were the volunteers who worked in the administrative office where I was located. Many of them appeared to have “issues.” One woman seemed quite ordinary but a little nervous and uptight. On my first day she came up behind my screen as I was entering tabs for Name, Address, and Sex of members in a database. And wait — she had passed out on the floor behind my table. Was she okay? Was she having a seizure? No one seemed at all concerned and everyone kept working except me. Finally my supervisor came over and opened one of (let’s call her Dora’s) eyelids with a fingertip and Dora popped up and went right back to work as if nothing had happened. I was mystified and fascinated.
This sequence of events (fainting, eyelid opening, instant regeneration) happened another two or three times during my first morning at the Red Cross and I finally pulled my supervisor aside and asked if there was something I should know. (Yes, this was nosy and inappropriate by modern ADA and HIPAA standards but in 1988 we were primitives.) She told me that there was a long list of words that made Dora faint if she heard them or saw them in print, including sex, men, Karen Carpenter, anorexia, and a few others I don’t remember. Dora was on disability and volunteered at the Red Cross as a safe environment and they did what they could to protect her from her triggers.
Wow. It must be really hard to go through life like that, I thought, while simultaneously wondering if I could take her to Vienna and publish a Freudian case study about her. Unfortunately I didn’t stay at the Red Cross long enough to uncover the exciting cause of her neurosis. However, in the early 90’s, I was doing some case law research for law school and I came across a sad afternote. Dora had sued her employer (not the Red Cross) under the Americans with Disabilities Act for allowing her co-workers to torment her by using her trigger words to make her faint. What an awful situation.
Well, what does this have to do with Sarah, my life, my current state of mind, my grief? How can I close the circle? I think I am easily triggered to feel excluded, not a part of things, outside the real world. Yet I also have a compulsion to stay away, to isolate myself, to do things alone. To wake up at 4 and go to bed at 7 or 8. How can I wrestle with the more schizoid aspects of my personality which I know are not serving me best? Today is not a day of answers.
The First Year Without Sarah 